Harmless Read Free

before them as bright as a lake beneath the stinging sunlight. Alex was less than a hundred feet away, his brown hair lighter and a little thinner, his shoulders wider than Joseph remembered, his body as solid as the wooden cabinets he built and sold in town. He was elevating his cupped left hand as though it protected a living thing, perhaps a caterpillar on its way to a terrarium by the store’s cash register, where its transformation to a butterfly would serve as a metaphor for societal regeneration.
    Alex nodded at him with exaggerated propriety before saying hello, making Joseph wonder if Jane had even told him about the visit. Would she have gone that far to make this reunion happen? Joseph tried to read her face but she was grimacing at Alex’s hand. She flattened out his palm, releasing a thin stream of blood and revealing a small puncture in the fleshy wedge beside his thumb that could have been a small berry ebbing juice. Joseph looked from the wound to the dry ground, where the blood had clotted in the rough shape of an anvil, and then out to the forest, his mind alert, as it always was in Alex’s presence, to the hidden connections between things. But there was nothingto see but grass and trees, thousands of them, standing in line across the field.
    “It’s nothing,” Alex said. His face was deeply tanned and his brown hair bleached by the sun, his thick back straight and his shoulders squared, a few extra lines around his eyes the only sign that Country Life wasn’t everything he’d envisioned. When he tried to lower his hand Jane held it up to catch the sun, then closed it.
    “What happened?” she asked.
    Alex shrugged, too casually. He had a story to tell her, but he wanted a little coaxing. He was too warm to blush but his face radiated pride and curiosity. The walk in the woods had activated the optimistic vitality that was his best feature.
    “I made it about three-quarters of the way to the old commune by Smith Road,” he said. “I was checking out a few abandoned mines.”
    “Alex has been mapping the ghost towns and abandoned mines and logging camps.”
    “In there?” Joseph said, pointing to the forest.
    Jane nodded and rubbed Alex’s shoulder, caught up in a rush of affection that Joseph interpreted as more familial than passionate, as if Alex was a younger brother who was going to do the family proud. Or so Joseph chose to read the gesture. Maybe he was being petty.
    “I didn’t know people still lived in communes,” he said.
    “Some vets and draft dodgers started a commune in the hills, decades ago,” Alex said. “It kind of went to seed.”
    “Drugs, wife-beating, incest—real sixties stuff,” Jane said. “I’m not worried about a bunch of old hippies. You know there’s a grow-op out there.”
    “The new local economy.” Alex could barely suppress his anger.
    “We talked about this,” she said. “Stay out of it. You’ll get yourself shot.”
    Joseph turned away, feeling like an interloper. An itch skittered across his scalp like a line of ants escaping a magnifying glass. The sun was relentless, and the first wave of booze sweat was surfacing on his forehead like diesel oil rising from a sunken ship. He should have slept on the train. He reached into his back pocket, but he’d left his BlackBerry at home for Franny’s sake, only to realize ten minutes into the trip that the last thing she wanted was his undivided attention.
    “You should get into the shade,” Jane said. “Alex can show you the lay of the land. I’m going to get a bandage.”
    The men took the hint: she wanted them to work something out before the other guests arrived. It hadn’t occurred to Joseph that she was also carrying an idealized version of the weekend, or that she was an adult with a detailed life plan, though she’d been that woman far longer than the wild Jane he’d known as a young man.
    They walked to a maple tree near the road and stood beneath the canopy of branches to take in